Gracious.

[truepenny]

There are over 500 of you.

::waves to everybody::

Since I have to write a synopsis of The Mirador today, and since synopsis-writing is an activity which I both hate and am incredibly bad at, I'm going to issue an open invitation:

Tell me something about yourself.

It's an invitation, obviously--nothing even as strong as a request--so if you don't want to, no harm, no foul. But if you'd like to (and this applies as much to the people I know as the people I don't) ... tell me something. Make it as long or as short, as serious or as goofy as you want. If you are a reader who doesn't have a LiveJournal account, that's totally cool, too--just please remember to sign your comment.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Something about myself: I hate writing synopses.

No, wait! That's something about everybody who writes fiction! About myself, hmmm. I have a birthmark on my right wrist, a little squiggly brown mark, and when I was little I pretended that it was a map of the island where we were really from, and someday we would go back there and wade through the snow to retake our castle, which was made of light grey stone and had big fires burning in the hearths all the time.

[larryhammer]

I come across as taller in person than I do online. Odd, but it's a frequent comment when I am defictionalized.

---L.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Of course you do. Online you're not as tall as the first joint of my thumb; in person, much taller. Also I think your head is proportionately smaller in person. (This should not be taken as a criticism.)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Attagirl: displacement activity to the max. It's good for you, it's good for me - being as I am exactly where you've been these last weeks, in mid-rewrite, mending broken book. Plus I have the advantage of being sick today, to set against the urgent approach of the delivery-date; I think of this as being like a spear where you set the butt-end of it into the ground, so that the oncoming monster will impale itself, hurrah...

Ah, but what can I tell you about me? Writer, cat-lover, queer, cook: and the greatest of these is - well, probably cook, actually. It's the one I do best. My books and my cats have all been heterodox, which I think must be my fault; and I'm inveterately single, so QED on that one.

I met Tolkien one time, that's a thing to say, but I say it too often. And I was in correspondence with Mary Renault when she died, but that's actually relevant today, because her Alexander dies on account of drinking wine when he has a fever; I'm not sure if this is an accurate diagnosis, but I'm going downstairs now to make the experiment. I've got to do something useful today, so I'm going to open a bottle of wine and sit at table with manuscript and scribble, scribble. Come tomorrow, if I'm found slumped dead across said table - well, tell them I died like Alexander.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I like knitting more than chocolate, but not more than books.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Now, see, that's not fair. That's being born with an advantage, a whole fantasy novel right there on your wrist...

[godream.livejournal.com]

I have six more neverending weeks of tedious debugging left for my summer job -- but my world is still a wonderful place because I get to bake tiny pies with fresh blueberries tonight! Mmm, blueberries. Mmm, pie. Mmm, baking.

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

heh. So here's a comment guaranteed to get me lynched.

I actually *like* writing synopses.

I like taking the giant amorphous pile of goo, flinging it at the wheel, and turning on the motor, muttering, "Let's see if we can make a pot out of this, shall we?" If you screw it up, just mush it back to the component goo and try again. Once you've gotten it looking like a solid, well-proportioned pot, then you can invest the time and energy to detail, decorate and fire it. But first you need the goo-to-pot conversion step.

Writing a synopsis for a completed book, on the other hand ... well, it's marginally better than ripping out a nail, but only because you recover from it faster.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm a middle-aged technical writer living in beautiful Northern California with two adolescents, a husband, and a standoffish cat. I love your books a lot. At the moment, I'm obsessed with Doctor Who; before that, as you know, it was Buffy, with a brief dip into Farscape in between.

I love lute and viol music.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Oooooh. I am immensely envious.

[sovay]

And I was in correspondence with Mary Renault when she died

That's marvelous. What were you in correspondence about?

[cammykitty.livejournal.com]

500??? Congrats. That's overwhelming.

And my hair is much longer, but less curly in person than on line.

Sarah, we've met at cons & I must apologize. Last time we met I said hi to a group of you who were still travel-lagged and I was in that "turn off the shy" con mode, where we are all united in our geekdom. You I'm sure just wanted to figure out what restaurant you were going to go to.

Ummm... synopsis... looks like the root word must refer to some Greek monster that trampled towns in half the time it takes Godzilla to trample Mobil Oil Stations. Oh, I'm thinking synapses, as in procrastination preceeds synaptic overload. Good luck!

[sovay]

Up until two summers ago, I had vestigial gills (which I did not know about) in my nose.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Oh, and inspired by mrissa: I used to have very strong synesthesia. I still do, to some extent, with music; I often remember musical themes as shapes in the air. Contrariwise, foods get remembered as music -- garlic and ginger are bass, lemon and sugar are soprano, bread is a nice middle range.

Did anybody else, as a child, think numbers and letters had distinct personalities? Two was female, as was three; five was very male. And the letter "e" in "evil" was itself evil.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I keep thinking the snow and the fires are going to stay entirely out of some book I write someday.

I should stop thinking that, because even in the book that takes place above the Arctic Circle in June, they're implied.

[cammykitty.livejournal.com]

Does that mean you have an affinty to water? Or you were one of those Age of Aquarious babies born in water?

[eruthros]

I fear geese.

I've been attacked by Canada geese three times: I don't know what they have against me, personally, but I think they must be mistaking me for someone else who committed crimes against geeseity. There are few things in the world quite as startling and baffling as walking along, mellow and not in a hurry, suddenly feeling sharp pinches on the back of your leg, and turning around to see a goose squawking at you, beating its wings threateningly, and nipping at your bum.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Also, the freckles and moles on my legs are star maps. And the reason they're leg-shaped is that space is curved. And all sorts of interesting things would happen to me if only I got into the region of space my leg freckles describe.

I only think to tell people these things now because I have realized that not everybody had these childhood convictions.

When I was 4, it occurred to me to be profoundly sorry for black people, because they couldn't see their star maps, so how would they know how to navigate if the computer went out in their spaceships? Then when I was a little older, I met my first black person with freckles, and I was relieved: it was merely a personal limitation rather than an ethnic one.

[mistri.livejournal.com]

I'm in my late twenties and yet I still go through phases. Writing is a constant, but (as examples), I've recently been obsessed with a) playing an online game to the point of addiction, b) spending too much money on (cheap) shoes, c) Buying BPAL perfume (still ongoing) d) watching Panda Cams.

My phases tend to start slow, then become very obsessive, until I realise I'm wasting time/money. This is why I don't gamble or do drugs - I don't think I could do either 'safely'.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Music has shapes to me as well, but food doesn't have music. (Colors, maybe.)

[violsva]

I'm trying to think of something about myself other than I just had my wisdom teeth out, since even with painkillers that's the main focus of my mind at the moment.

I can make apple pie from scratch, crust and all. And very good bread. It's slightly painful to think about these things when one can't eat.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Today I am in silver and black. For some reason I feel much more like a mythos (or an archtype, maybe?) in those colors.

Maybe Zelazny's Amber books imprinted more more strongly than I ever realized?

[ombriel.livejournal.com]

I'm revising my first novel, and I have no idea what I'm doing.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

An adaptation of one of her books - 'The Charioteer', which (for those who don't know) is not as Greek as it sounds: it's her one truly successful (IMO) contemporary novel - into a radio play. Technically. Actually we were talking about all sorts of stuff, the way you do. And it's become an Anecdote, because her last letter apologised profusely for the long delay, only she'd been in bed sick, and she wished that pneumonia was kill-or-cure like it had been in her nursing days rather than dragging on and on for ever, but at least she was feeling better and back at her desk at last - and a couple of hours after the letter arrived, my dad phoned to say that she'd just died.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Tuesday is blue, always blue. And I love that about the letter "e" - but was it evil in other contexts, or only in "evil"?